What is sad about this is that for all the negative things we can say about celebreality tv and its slightly worse "reality tv" counterparts is that its success is entirely do to the demand for more from the American consumer. If you wonder what happened to good writing-that costs money so we get reality tv. If you wonder what happened to good acting-that costs money so we get reality tv. In order for the demand for quality programming to do its job it needs to appear in the first place. That means that you the consumer need to shut off the celebreality or stop complaining about its truly innane existence.

Britney Spears evidently generated $75 million in income last year...to magazines that do stories about her.

1. It IS child abuse...but given that the families who put their precious pre-teen kids into show biz earn tens to hundreds of million dollars thorugh their kids, its the kind of child abuse that er...gets by.

2. The audience IS the problem. But in a nation where lots of people are functioning in varying levels of low-level mental illness, its the kind of non-violent mental illness that er...gets by.

I think part of what you're saying, RML, can be attributed to the fact that Americans live in fantasy land. They're so busy sniffing around everyone else's life that they don't pay any attention to their own. I find it extremely difficult while standing in line at the grocery store next to the idiot-mag of the week to refrain from holding the damn thing in the air, pointing to it and shouting, "WHO GIVES A F***?!?" People chatter about the latest piece of celebrity gossip like it was the most important thing on Earth. There's a war going on, but we're enthralled with Brad Pitt and whatever the hell starlet he's boinking this week.

Oh, but, it's just an escape, FordMan. Life is hard and we just don't want to think about all the horrific problems in our lives. I mean, I bought this (non-hybrid) Chevy Suburban and it costs $30 million to fill it and I bought a $400,000 house when I should have only bought a $80,000 house and...escape, escape, escape...AAAAGHH!!! Enough already.

You're absolutely right. This crap won't go away until the market for it does. The disgusting thing is that people don't want good writing or interesting story lines. They might have to think a little. No, we want to see whether or not Bobby screws Mary-Sue on "Survivor-Mojave." We've gone from being obsessed with fictional worlds to being obsessed with average idiots in fictional worlds. Woo hoo.

Seriously, I watched a couple of what I considered the better reality and some celebreality tv, stuff like The Osbournes, Dog The Bounty Hunter, Gene Simmons Family Jewels and Criss Angel and a few others. Those are/were pretty good. I used to watch Survivor for a couple seasons but got tired of it. The ones on the big networks are pretty bad in general, i.e. Who Want To Marry A Millionaire? And The Bachelor. Some of them were commonly talked about with seeming interest around the water cooler which obviously must be a sign of the times or peoples' intelligence or something.

But when I really thought about it, if producers, directors or whomever has the ability to edit, reshoot or cut out scenes and whatever, is it really reality? It's like having a product in the supermarket that the company calls organic but they could label anything organic, there's no regulation for what they can call organic. So to me reality tv is basically Theoretically Reality TV, very similar to any tv, lol. Anyway since they cancelled The Dog and I hope it comes back I've sorta gotten out of the loop of Theoretical Reality TV and watch other stuff if I watch at all.

Peoples standards get lower and lower over time. I just laugh a lot of stuff off. lol

Well, we're taught from early ages all about fantasy from just turning on the TV. The stuff that they are trying to sell us all the time teaches people that marketing and money alone is more important than substance. Corporate America wants us to be what we are so they make sure we all get TV's to sell us stuff. Phones, were we born with phones? The computer is the same exact thing.

They created the culture, they should love it and they seem to, even that is pretty hollow based on the number of unhappy, psychotic or criminal minds we have in this country.